The Electro-Hobo's Guide to the galaxy

Communities Blog
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disclaimer, I suck at writing and I'm in walmart on a laptop

So you're a tech-head and you find yourself in a less than favorable situation, you lost your car or your home, or even your job and it seems like your life has gone to hell

well I've been there and these are the techniques, apps, and tips on how I survived

so you don't have internet, you need it to stay in touch with people, get your news, stay up to date with the next big thing in amd/intel/nvidia/linux/insertwhathaveyou, or you just need some entertainment in your life from youtube or soundcloud.

There are various ways to get it, the most common and easiest to find is mcdonalds which is everywhere globally all you have to do is connect via wifi and open up your browser and go to a page you'll be autoredirected to the mcdonalds wifi ToS aggrement page
now the best thing about this is you can access it both indoors in the warm/cool AC or outside in your car

now its not the most reliable or fastest but its the most abundant

now if you want the second most abundant but the fastest that would be Walmart wifi

  • various fastfood joints in my rural area benched about 150KBps
  • walmart benched about 500~600KBps in my rural area, took a good 20 hours for metal gear solid V to finish on steam while surfing the web and didn't auto disconnect me

now that you got internet, here's some tips on keeping your phone/tablet/laptop juiced up

for walmart bring a backpack/laptop bag/ clothed grocery bag that you can put your device, AC adaptor and your best friend, the battery bank and spare extended battery

if your lucky you can find a bench right inside the gondola area with the drink machines and have free power outlets, usually where you find the walmart hoverrounds charging

now you should be able to also get signal in the side parking lots in your car, I know I did

now if you aren't able to get an AC/DC charging source charge the laptop before hand and bring a phone or tablet with a battery bank/backup spare battery here's how you get 10 hours out of your laptop

turn on the laptop, turn on and sign into the wifi and then setup the download, say a steam download of metal gear, once you got that set up be sure the laptop is set to do nothing when the screen is shut and the sleep and hibernation policy is disabled, and the processors is in its lowest active powerstate.

the screen is one of the biggest power drains, my 2011 lenovo thinkpad with a first gen i5 last about 11 hours on a 20$ extened battery with the screen closed, would last even longer if I had a SSD in it

so you can have your "headless" laptop downloading while you're using your phone or tablet to enjoy the internet, you can put it in a laptop bag while you're walking around inside (window) shopping or in your car while you take a nap

but I wanna use the internet at home

well if you are on ATT or verizon (I think) this is simple turn on your wifi hotspot and use your 4G data, use it sparingly I go through 10GB in 2 weeks, though if you're straight talk or net10 then your phones tethering ability is gimped, UNLESS you have PDAnet+ and Usb Tether

you can use PDAnet USB tethering 2 ways

  1. tethering your 3G/4G connection to your laptop/desktop
  2. using your phone as a Wifi adapter by using your phones wifi anttenna to connect to nearby wifi and tethering that through USB to your desktop or laptop if you don't have an adapter

Random useful apps in very rare specfic situations probably not that useful then

  • Pdanet+: useful for tethering your phone or tablets wifi or cellular connection
  • soundwire: don't have any desktop/laptop speakers or headphones for whatever reason, you can tether the audio to your phone or tablet via usb/bluetooth/wifi
  • Teamviewer: you can control your laptop or desktop from another device such as a laptop, desktop, phone, or tablet through the internet
  • OperaMini: has by far the best built in browser compress available great for when you're on a tight bandwidth data cap
  • OperaMax: great data compression VPN that compresses ALL non HTTPS data not just your browsers
  • Google Chrome: both desktop and phone apps have built in data saver modes you can enable, although its not as great compression as the opera one, it is more reliable
  • ZXtune: is an android app that lets your phone play machine code songs from old consoles, this is useful when you're on your "unlimited" dial up portion of your data because the songs in machine code are like less than a kilobyte and you can have something to listen to
  • PhotoCompress: this app lets you comptress and edit photos to smaller sizes, useful on your slow "unlimited" data portion of your data plan
  • 7zipper: this is a file compression/managment app for android useful when you need to upload something on limited/slow data speeds as well as freeing up space on your phone, there is also a desktop version 7-zip
  • Virtual Router: this turns your laptop into a wifi hotspot, useful when your phone doesn't have this feature and you need wifi to a device such as a PS4 when all you have is 4G and not ethernet or wifi, you can usb tether your phone to your laptop and use VR to use the wifi adaptopr to broadcast wifi so you can use your PS4 to update and what not
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Libraries I find are the best in terms of speed, and if you don't have a computer and need to get something done, like make a bootable linux live cd, than the library is the way to go, or even better you can boot linux on the old optiplexes that run vista and have yourself a fun time

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libraries are great too

forgot to include them because I don't have one within a 40 mile radius, but I have a walmart within 3, isn't the world great

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Oh, I know you said you live out in the middle of no where, I live next to the second best Ivy league school in the nation, in that case walmart all the way

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its all about what you have available and how you use it!

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bingo, also getting hardware to run stuff on, the dumpster behind best buy is by far one of the best places

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